Instead of paying a licensed broker to buy, sell or trade on your behalf, you control bitcoin transactions from your smartphone with free apps like Coinbase, LibertyX or Cash App, which all allow you to buy bitcoin. You can even blend 20th-century and 21st-century banking by visiting one of the over 3,400 bitcoin ATMs located around the U.S. and the world.

Once you’ve purchased your bitcoin, it will be stored in your virtual wallet.

There’s no simple answer to this one because it depends on who you ask.

If you ask an early bitcoin investor or anyone who purchased the currency pre-January 2017, they’ll tell you they paid less than $1,000 per bitcoin unit. Since its December 2017 price peak at $19,086.64, the highly volatile bitcoin has fluctuated and hovered at times around $10,000 per unit. At its lowest since that peak, bitcoin was $5,848.26 in June 2018. That’s almost a 70 percent price drop in just six months.

The price of bitcoin, like all cryptocurrencies, is market dependent — meaning the price is dictated by the economic principles of scarcity, utility, supply and demand.

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